Why work on eevie?

that’s Lenni, looking slightly panicky about the tasks ahead… :P

To investors I could run down our mission which is to facilitate individual sustainability, and our vision, which is a world in which everyone lives sustainably. (Damn we worked pretty hard on these statements and they actually feel decent even if somewhat hollow).

To any stranger I usually end up explaining that small actions matter if we all do them and eevie will show us our collective impact and thereby motivate us.

To my friends and family, well it’s funny nobody really ever asks the why… I think people often implicitly assume one of three things. That making a sustainability focused, habit forming app is a “good” thing to do, its virtuous somehow. Conversely that there might be a lot of money to be made with a trendy topic, but an app like Eevie won’t be able to contribute anything towards sustainability. Finally that you have to choose if you want to do something good or if you want to make money, you can’t do both.

“We started out because we wanted to do a big project together, challenge ourselves and do something meaningful.”

From the first idea to where we are now the question of why has never really left me. We started out because we wanted to do a big project together, challenge ourselves and do something meaningful. But I often wondered if the success incentive competes against the potential meaning? I think it doesn’t need to, but we are a small start up, we are doing this for the first time, we really want the company to be, well … a company. And what are we really doing? We are helping people reuse cups, get rid of straws, bring their own bags when they go shopping, have a couple of meatless meals per week, then we estimate the potential impact of those single acts, convert them to CO2 or trees or glacier ice and add them all up, to show the impact we achieve together. This might seem a little arbitrary and on top of that you’ll mess up all that impact by taking a single flight.

“Small seemingly insignificant steps add up! And they do so not only aggregated over many people, but from within you.“

From this perspective it can be quite disheartening but it really is an unnecessarily pessimistic view. Small seemingly insignificant steps add up! And they do so not only aggregated over many people, but from within you. Monitoring and adjusting your consumption behavior leads you to more awareness, talking about your goals and habits reinforces it, and a few months down the line you might even consider taking a train rather than flying, or carbon offset your flight, or be politically active or … the point is to get started and surprise yourself with the change you’ll be able to make.

A couple of years of work on this topic make me feel like it is in fact very worthwhile. Even though we haven’t provided a perfect solution for sustainability yet, we have identified a bunch of small things you can do today. They don’t take much effort, they don’t have the biggest impact, but they will change you. They slowly make you into the person that will make bigger more impactful actions, and that can come up with the next necessary idea, the next not so small solution.

“They slowly make you into the person that will make bigger more impactful actions, and that can come up with the next necessary idea, the next not so small solution.“

I am starting to get a real feeling that if we continue on our way we will build a community of people motivated and driven towards change and as the eevie team we will be able to fuel that movement with more and more tools to enable it. Start by avoiding single use cups, bags and straws today, it matters more than you might think. We would love your feedback, participation and patience as we make Eevie what it needs to be.

Lenni is a co-founder of eevie and has designed much of eevies’ architecture. Besides codinG Lenni IS A circus artist who loves to dance on walls and throw people!